The long-term plan no-doubt involves nuclear-electric propulsion, because using 21st century technology to solve problems using stone-age bash-head-with-rock strategies is what modern science and technology is all about.

The sad thing is that there are people who are smart enough to work on this stuff but so stupid they think doing so is a good idea, and whose response to anyone pointing this out is some moronic, cowardly gibberish along the lines of, "Yeah, who do you think is going to protect you from the Bad Guys [TM] when they come for your scarce resources?" instead of, "You're right, we have the means to create universal abundance so we don't have to worry about scarce resources any more..."

You say that like it's a bad thing... at least he's doing this in a relatively harmless way, unlike the security/industrial complex.

Unfortunately, no tool can be more reliable than the person operating it, and there is a wealth of empirical data demonstrating that untrained (ie typical) handgun owners are extremely unreliable.

Handgun proficiency is hard. Anyone who has even moderate experience with firearms knows this, and knows that handgun proficiency declines dramatically under pressure and when the person has not been actively, regularly and recently (as in, the past few weeks to months) training for combat/emergency response. This is why cops are required to maintain proficiency through regular training, and it's easy to find firearms experts who are critical of how low those proficiency standards are.

People who argue for concealed carry and the use of handguns as a defensive tool for untrained or poorly trained individuals who are not required by law to undergo weekly or monthly refreshers are arguing for something that is dangerous, unreliable and virtually useless as a means of defense against attack of any kind.

Again: anyone familiar with the actual proficiency requirements for the effective use of handguns in emergency situations is an advocate for strictly limiting them to highly trained individuals who undergo regular proficiency maintenance. To argue otherwise is simply to declare your ignorance of the vast amount of empirical data that demonstrates just how hard it is to use a handgun reliably.

The latter claim in no way follows from the former, and if your IQ was as high has mine you'd see that.

Saying "all governments are corrupt" is either an observation that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, or an imputation that the gross and rampant corruption that Americans experience every day is somehow of no greater concern than the tiny bits of corruption the rest of us in the developed world experience.

Either option marks you out as kind of a twit, y'know?

The much, much bigger problem is that there are a small number of people who are getting very rich selling the illusion that they can do something to stop it. If it wasn't for the opportunities to funnel money into the pockets of unproductive generators of dead-weight losses in the security/industrial complex terrorism would simply be a minor nuisance, akin to traffic accidents.

It is the quislings who make terrorism so problematic.

No, gun nuts are the problem.

The rate of gun ownership in Canada is about half what it is in the US, with 22% of households having guns vs your 45%. In Canada, only about 2.3% of households have handguns (under very restrictive conditions and with limited magazines) as opposed to about 25% of American households.

The rate of gun suicide in Canada is about equal to that in the US, which is significant because the primary purpose of owning a gun is to kill yourself: that is the most common use of guns against humans in both the US and Canada, and why wouldn't we identify the most common use as the purpose of the tool?

The really interesting thing, though, is that the rate of gun homicide in Canada is less than 20% of that in the US (0.7 per 100,000 vs somewhat more than 4 per 100,000)

One intriguing possibility that would explain this difference is that while we have lots of guns, we have very few handguns and virtually no assault weapons.

This is intriguing because handguns and assault weapons are designed specifically to kill other people, and the difference in gun use between Canada and the US is specifically in the use of guns to kill other people.

Anyone who isn't a gun nut can see this, and is at least very intrigued by the possibility that Canadian-style near-elimination of handgun and assault weapons from the United States might lead to a factor of five reduction in gun homicide. Unfortunately many people (the ones I've designated "gun nuts") think this would be a bad thing.

So you're right: the problem is not the guns. The problem is the nuts.

what's the core problem, here? tools that move people? we have so many of those. just outlaw anything that could move people? go all 'london' as an over-reaction?

the core problem is people are crazy and act out.

if all cars were gone tomorrow, loonies would still travel.

cars are not the problem

The difficulty seems to be that the people who think like this live in a world of mechanical cause and effect in which every individual death has a definite mechanical cause that is never related to the easily availability of a tool for killing people.

They don't seem to be able to grasp that making something easier means there will be more of it, so they aren't able to understand that easy availablity of guns neccessarily and inevitably leads to more people being killed by guns.

A precisely equivalent claim is: "Cars don't travel, people travel. Banning cars won't stop people from travelling. And lots of people who don't own cars still travel. I know someone who doesn't own a car, and they take the subway all the time. So eliminating cars won't change a single thing!"

We can all agree that anyone who made such an argument would have to be insane, but incontinent gun-addicts make it all the time.

Your "defense" of PHP is that you know nothing about language design, so you can't see what the problem is?

Thanks for that awesome metaphor!

Every single time that delightfully deep and correct analysis of PHP's shortcomings is mentioned someone who doesn't know anything about language design chimes in with this ridiculous, "Yes but no language is perfect!" line. As if "every well-designed language consists of an intersection of compromises between incompatible ideals" is in any way an answer to, "PHP is fractal of bad design."

I'm not totally sure why anyone thinks "no language meets some impossible standard I've just made up in my head" is relevant to the obviously true claim that "some languages are better than others, and all languages are MUCH better than PHP."

I'm pretty sure he actually meant this: "Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients." (low and middle income countries)

Or this: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This reportâ"an update to two earlier editionsâ"includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nationsâ"Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdomâ"the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes."

But do please continue to spout ideology-addled "corrections" that contradict reality. It amuses the hell out of the rest of us to watch you do it. And keep on losing those elections while you're at it!

My impression is that they've done a secondary calculation using a different technique from their original detailed finite element one, and that this new approach agrees within error of their previous work, which does count as new, and important, although I agree the article manages to obscure the history pretty effectively. Which is funny given how much history it recounts.

The Committee for Supporting the Ridiculous Kabuki Theatre that Passes for Environmental Policy Discussion would like to extend its gratitude to you for stepping up and posting the mandated reply to the inevitable idiot who comments that "windmills kill birds" twenty years after the major changes to windmill design substantially mitigated the problem.

The Committee estimates that there are still roughly 3.2 billion idiots on Earth who have not updated their beliefs from the 1980s, and appreciate that while the task of replying to every single one of these unmitigated morons is arduous, tireless volunteers like yourself will eventually have replied to each and every one of them at least once by 2075.

By that time, it is estimated that the average idiot will have been corrected at least 5 times, and that perhaps as many as 1% of them will have updated their beliefs in light of reality. While this number may seem disappointingly small in fractional terms, remember: it is still upwards of 30 million human beings whose tiny little minds have been changed by pointing out just how stupid they look when repeating falsehoods from several decades past.

Keep up the good work!

This is as much about regional as partisan politics, although both have a role. The US is a relatively weak federation in important respects, and the ability of regional power bases to disrupt national policy is considerable.

In science and technology, this usually appears as pork for supporters: various bits of the space shuttle (most famously, the SRBs) had to be made in particular states to garner the support of the appropriate senators.

For single-site projects, like the superconducting supercolider in the '80's, everyone was for it until a specific site was identified, at which point everyone but the representatives from that state (Texas, I think), and that concerted opposition was enough to kill it.

In the case of Yucca Mountain, the representatives from Nevada (notably Harry Reid) were able to concentrate their opposition, while no one was particularly zealous in favour of it.

So in the US, single-site projects that have high political or economic costs or benefits to the state involved tend to fail. This is built in to the US system of regional representation.

As such, local storage of waste--which would eliminate the decidedly non-negligible transport risk--is likely the only viable solution for Americans, because your government is structurally incapable of sustaining any other solution.